An investigation by the University of Catania highlights both their complexities and potential

Making a profit, but not just that – striking the best possible balance, also in terms of social and territorial responsibilities. These are the goals that hybrid organisations, characterised by a higher number of functional domains and the coexistence of different value systems, set for themselves. These are enterprises to be studied with care, just as Rosaria Ferlito and Rosario Faraci (post-doc researcher the former, professor of Business Economic and Management the latter, both at the University of Catania) do in their research paper “Sostenibilità e sistemi di Corporate Governance delle società benefit: il caso Illycaffè” (“Sustainability and corporate governance systems in benefit companies: the case study of Illycaffè”): a kind of exploration of this theme, first looking at the theory and then how it works in practice, through an concrete example of governance.

Hybrid companies, so the argument begins, represent a model of wider corporate governance that requires assuming responsibility not only in terms of ownership but also of stakeholders. Three aspects (real ones, of course) are investigated: balancing different principles, monitoring actions and results, and external communication, that is, how information is presented to public and stakeholders.

To achieve an accurate analysis, Ferlito and Faraci begin by looking at the theory, with an overall examination of benefit companies that, as well as pursuing profit, also focus on one or more common good goals, and then explore the case study of company Illycaffè.

The main point arising from this investigation is that human aspects as related to production management and organisation are crucial. This not only entail choosing the “right” people, but also their proper organisation into work teams, as well as clear operational guidelines, awareness of the goals to be achieved, and the notion of working for the sake of a group of people, not just for one’s own.

Ferlito and Faraci’s paper is an important one, because it strives to rationalise a difficult and constantly evolving theme.

Sostenibilità e sistemi di Corporate Governance delle società benefit: il caso Illycaffè (“Sustainability and corporate governance systems in benefit companies: the case study of Illycaffè”)

Rosaria Ferlito, Rosario Faraci

Corporate Governance and Research & Development Studies – Open Access, (2, 2021)

A recently published book analyses our current situation and its possible outlooks

Much more connected yet extremely divided – a critical condition that diminishes the chances for growth (and not only in economic terms) and social cohesion, as well as positive feelings towards the future. Here is where the tangle of issues and difficulties faced by Western social and economic systems lies. It needs to be taken seriously and to be fully understood. This is why Un mondo diviso. Come l’Occidente ha perso crescita e coesione sociale (A world divided. How growth and social cohesion have declined in the West) makes for useful reading – it is a superlative and informative work by Eugenio Occorsio and Stefano Scarpetta (the former is a journalist, the latter is the Director of the Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Directorate at OECD).

This book provides a clear analysis of what has happened in the Western world due to the growing gap in income and assets, very limited social mobility and a strained middle class. A situation highly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged and disrupted the world as we know it. The two authors examine the past and explore what has changed after these last two years. Above all, they wonder whether the measures adopted by governments worldwide have succeeded in containing the impact on the most vulnerable areas of society and look at which opportunities and challenges we now face in order to rebuild a fairer economy.

The work is structured over nine sections: a snapshot of rising inequalities, the analysis of how the so-called “social mobility elevator” broke down, an exploration of “growth”, the depiction of a distraught middle class, an outline of opportunities, a piece on the theme of redistribution and one on training and education, and finally an investigation on the condition of younger people followed by a close examination of gender gap issues. The conclusion drawn suggests that we can expect some positive prospects in the future, but that these will only be seized by those who “have the tools” to do so.

This is not just due to the events occurred in the past two years, the authors emphasise, although the pandemic has caused the worst health crisis of the century, as well as a vicious economic and social crisis that has raged against the most vulnerable areas of society, such as low-skilled and temporary workers, migrants, women and young people. Discrepancies have become starker and the consequences threaten to be long-term.

Of course, Occorsio and Scarpetta also ask themselves how a supportive social fabric and a fairer economic system can be rebuilt. The answer lies in being able to imagine a better world that even surpasses the one we just left behind, and attempt to fix the framework itself, not merely solve temporary issues.

Occorsio and Scarpetta’s work features a great quality: it narrates and explains complex and serious problems using a clear and comprehensible language, which is no small matter.

Un mondo diviso. Come l’Occidente ha perso crescita e coesione sociale (A world divided. How growth and social cohesion have declined in the West)

Eugenio Occorsio, Stefano Scarpetta

Laterza, 2022

To achieve a more balanced and stable culture, better quality of life and a future we can look forward to with hope, we need science – and scientific research and the development of technologies on a human scale need more women scientists. “Too few young women choose to pursue scientific studies, we need to do more” asserted Prime Minister Mario Draghi last week, while visiting the laboratories of the Istituto nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, situated below the Gran Sasso massif in Italy, one of the most renowned research centres for nuclear physics worldwide.

“Doing more” can be translated into an actual figure: a billion euro, an investment aimed at strengthening the teaching of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) and overcome gender stereotypes, still perpetuated by the fact that even today only one young woman out of five chooses to study one of these disciplines at university level.

This billion is part of a large investment package for education and research totalling €30 billion, a portion of PNRR (the Italian recovery and resilience plan) funds. Thanks to the EU’s Recovery Plan, €6.9 billion will be devolved to basic research activities, with the clear aim of trying to rapidly bridge the gap that, historically, has always set Italy apart from other major European countries. A gap that, unfortunately, is widening. Indeed, according to data presented in Parliament by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria on 15 February, in Italy only €158 per person are invested to fund public research (universities and the National Research Council of Italy) as compared to the EU average of €263 and Germany’s €415. This figure amounts to 0.56% of the Italian GDP (which has remained stable for the past 20 years) as opposed to the EU average of 0.8% and Germany’s 1%. Basically, it’s just not enough.

This investment is boosted by private contributions, which increased from 0.5% in 2000 to 0.94% in 2020. Yet, while Italian companies are attempting to become more competitive on international markets that are increasingly more technological and selective, Italy actually lacks appropriate support to conduct basic research, let alone applied research.

Confindustria suggests that greater public funding is needed – and that it should amount to at least the EU average – as well as a long-term fiscal stimulus to encourage private investments. This could then generate synergy between the public and private spheres, as the finest instances of collaboration between the academic and the corporate sectors show (the positive experiences by the two polytechnic universities in Milan and Turin are extremely indicative).

More research and more science, then – and more women involved, following the examples of Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General at CERN; Lucia Votano, the first woman appointed as director of the Gran Sasso laboratory; Maria Chiara Carrozza, president of the CNR; Maria Cristina Messa, Minister of University and Research (and a medical doctor engaged in research work); and all the other women who are increasingly gaining success in prestigious universities and international research centres.

More women scientists. More women researchers with prominent leadership roles, as it happens with men. More women in STEM.

And speaking of STEM university degrees, a point could be made. A point contained by one letter, the “A” of arts – that is, the range of humanities subjects that should be interwoven with scientific knowledge. A move from STEM to STEAM, taking into consideration a deep-rooted feature of Italian culture that characterised the best eras of Humanism and the Renaissance, as well as 20^th-century industrial progress: that of a multidisciplinary “polytechnic culture”, where multifaceted knowledge is a strength, where maths and philosophy, engineering and literature, neurological sciences and sociology, history, economy and chemistry, aesthetics and information technology, interlink. Some people even see interdisciplinarity as a trait of women’s intelligence and cognizance.

STEAM and not just STEM, then – this was the outcome of the long and detailed process that Assolombarda carried out in past years. A conclusion confirmed by the evolution of the so-called “knowledge economy”, whereby different yet complementary viewpoints and sets of knowledge intersect, while the development of Artificial Intelligence further adds new technical challenges and philosophical issues related to the nature of sentience and possible directions to follow.

Science and beauty, in essence, and the beauty of science, just as Primo Levi taught us in his intriguing Il sistema periodico (The periodic table) and Leonardo Sinisgalli in his Furor mathematicus (Mathematical madness). Levi was a chemist and an author while Sinisgalli was a poet and an engineer, and the works of both should be studied, read and reread by everyone, and possibly inspiring future women scientists.

For the sixth year in a row, the Pirelli Foundation is again taking part in MuseoCity, which is promoted by the City of Milan. From 4 to 6 March 2022, it will involve institutions and museums around the city, as well as some outside Milan.

The Pirelli Foundation is organising Back to Bicocca: Pirelli e i luoghi dell’industria, an interactive online show for people of all ages, created in collaboration with the Associazione Culturale Dramatrà. Through tests and games, the participants will learn about the long history of the Bicocca district in Milan and find out about the buildings, both ancient and modern, that have been put to very different uses over the years, becoming symbols of the transformation that the area has undergone over the course of two centuries. Pirelli has been in this area since 1907 and still today has its Headquarters here, with its Global Research and Development Centre and the Pirelli Foundation, which also houses the Group’s Historical Archive.

A journey through past and present to discover the city of Milan, through the story of a girl in search of her family history, which is intertwined with that of Pirelli. The protagonist will find herself facing a challenge that she can win only with the help of the participants, who will have to try to solve tests of skill and ingenuity.

To register, please fill in the form at this link. Booking required. Registration ends on Tuesday 1 March 2022. The meeting, which will last approximately 75 minutes, will be held live on the Microsoft Teams platform.

Detailed information concerning participation in the online events will be sent to you in the booking confirmation e-mail.

A new tool is available for consulting the online Historical Archive. The digital collection can now be searched not only by type, such as papers, photographs, drawings, posters, and magazines, but also by content. To achieve this, a structured set of more than 800 entries concerning the history of Pirelli has been created, all linked to each other hierarchically: some general themes have been selected, linked to production, communication, and sport, and each of these has then been structured internally into more specific sub-themes. The thematic macro areas are thus tyres, miscellaneous products and cables. Each production sector is then divided into its various branches; tyres into those for cars, trucks, farm machinery, bicycles, motorcycles, and miscellaneous products into technical items for industrial use, retail, sport, and the home. The tyre sector is closely tied to that of the means of transport that have been fitted with them over the years: from the most prestigious cars, such as those made by Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and others, to motorcycles such as Bianchi, Gilera, Guzzi, Indian, and Yamaha to name but a few, and bicycles (Bianchi, Maino, Prinetti Stucchi and others). Lastly, there are trucks, farm machinery, aeroplanes and airships. And then, of course, there is motorsport, with the historic races in Italy and around the world in which Pirelli tyres have played a key role, such as the Targa Florio, the Monza Grand Prix, the Mille Miglia, and the Monte Carlo rally.

Then there are Pirelli’s factories and offices: the Bicocca plant and factories in various countries around the world, but also the Pirelli Tower and the Vizzola Ticino test track.

And there is also a fascinating chapter on the history of communication and design, as well as on the products themselves, at the countless trade fairs and shows that Pirelli has taken part in with its tyres and articles for the nautical, fashion, packaging and toy sectors, and many more.

All this content can now be explored on the page devoted to browsing by subject, selecting the items from a tree structure and pulling up all the digital resources in the archive that have to do with the selected theme. At the same time, the thesaurus entries are added to the other filters (by date, place, person or organisation) that appear in each documentary section (documents, photographs, drawings and posters, and audio-visuals).

The online archive is thus enriched with another important tool that opens up the company’s documents with 150 years of the history of Italy and the world.

Useful contributions and analyses to better understand what is happening and how to better deal with new situations have been collected in a recently published book

Employment has changed over the last two years. In fact, the whole production system (and, more in general, the whole social system) has changed over the last two years. It is one of the consequences of the COVID-19 storm, which has radically transformed how we conceive human coexistence. A transformation that has affected – it could not have been otherwise – human relationships in factories and offices, too. This is the theme around which revolve the studies collected by Paola Frison and Luigi Spadarotto in Il futuro delle risorse umane. Come innovarne la gestione generando innovazione (The future of human resources. How to innovate its management and generate innovation) in a recently published book, which attempts to answer a specific question: how have the pandemic and its related economic and social transformations affected organisational choices related to human resources management? This issue is not restricted to the world of production, it actually touches a significant part of all our lives.

The book’s curators have asked some of the most important consultants and scholars on the topic to examine, from their own viewpoint, the links between human resources management, innovation and social change. This has given rise to a series of essays dealing with this complex question, as well as with the “overheated climate” dictated by the pandemic.

The book, then, includes some overarching themes, in order to frame its subject-matter (which comprises notions about innovation and human resources management), as well as some more specific topics, such as the changes that innovation and the different context in which we operate demand from human resources management, the role played by human resources managers when corporate innovation becomes necessary, the new mechanisms introduced for the selection of collaborators and other tools available, the links between “cultural diversity” and innovation.

Contributors to Frison and Spadarotto’s work have successfully met the challenge while always keeping into account the particular historical period we are living in, as well as its social, psychological, logistical and contractual consequences, resulting in a book that also represents an excellent tool to better deal with change in companies and factories.

Il futuro delle risorse umane. Come innovarne la gestione generando innovazione (The future of human resources. How to innovate its management and generate innovation) 

Paola Frison, Luigi Spadarotto (curated by)

Guerini Next, 2022

A collection of literature on Smart Working provides interpretations and analyses on the latest frontier of corporate work

Working from home, but not only – working according to individual schedules, modes and locations that better suit the individual. This is Smart Working, which has played a significant role in production organisations in recent years, and not just because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The concept of Smart Working is only a superficially “easy” one and this is why it is important to examine it with care. Maria Laura Frigotto, Simone Gabbriellini, Luca Solari and Alice Tomaselli have succeeded in bringing some order to the large body of studies and research on this topic with Lo Smart Working nel panorama italiano: un’analisi della letteratura (Smart Working in Italy: a literature review), a remarkable overview of all relevant research generated by Italian academics (a considerable limitation that, however, does not detract anything from this substantial body of studies).

This is not only a praiseworthy effort – the merits of the work undertaken by Frigotto and the other researchers also lie in how it clarifies that Smart Working is not a phenomenon exclusively brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, we immediately learn how the ways in which work is organised and carried out in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is becoming increasingly important. It also points out how in Italy, too, and in both private companies and public administration, managing work according to more autonomous schedules, locations and modes is becoming an increasingly widespread occurrence – Smart Working (SW), in other words, which in Italy has been regulated ad hoc since 2017 (Law 81/2017) under the terms of agile working.

The authors begin with the literature review, then proceed to summarise the key features of SW, understood as a working mode that allows to align workers’ objectives with companies’ goals, thus still contributing to their competitiveness and still supporting the new organisational models that are arising. In SW mode, workers undergo more training and acquire new skills, while HR specialists and managers are learning to abandon a culture based on workplace “presence” and supervision in favour of one based on sharing and trust. Great attention is also paid to legal aspects, which are also part of the debate: from a comparison of SW with remote working, to changing notions of managerial authority, including the concepts of subordination and autonomy, to the role of collective bargaining, the right to disconnect, and the application of SW in the particular sphere of public administration.

This investigation by Frigotto and her peers not only makes for a good read – it also makes for a useful handbook to be consulted when a better understanding of the true nature of agile working becomes a necessity.

Lo Smart Working nel panorama italiano: un’analisi della letteratura (Smart Working in Italy: a literature review)

Maria Laura Frigotto, Simone Gabbriellini, Luca Solari, Alice Tomaselli

STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI, 2021, 2

Two words for Milan? “Small and gracious”, says Lucia Mascino during a break in the rehearsal of Smarrimento (Bewilderment) at the Teatro Franco Parenti theatre, directed by Lucia Calamaro; meantime, on the small screen, her starring role on the TV series Delitti del BarLume (Murders at BarLume), with Filippo Timi, is becoming increasingly more popular.

“Small and gracious” – two unusual terms for this metropolis that keeps on growing, investing, innovating, its cranes busy building ambitiously sumptuous neighbourhoods and high-tech companies, research centres and investment banks, luxury boutiques and fusion restaurants, in a turmoil of expanding wealth and new social issues, attractions and scary episodes of urban violence. Yet, in an incisive interview on la Repubblica (11 February), Mascini reiterates: “At first I was struck by its well-being, everyone seemed so clean, freshly showered and shampooed. Well-combed hair, scented – a bit too much perhaps. Then I changed my mind…”. Basically, “I don’t like the Milan that flaunts itself at the cocktail hour, but if you know it, you can avoid it.”

Lucia Mascino is a fine, intelligent and sensitive artist. She knows how to go beyond appearances, notices the discrepancies, explores the contradictions. And she’s deft at discerning beauty and gentleness beyond the city’s fragile trends and neurotic business deals that sharpen inequalities, at detecting the city’s ingrained traits, those that still distinguish it, that used to captivate Stendhal and, after him, generations of insightful intellectuals, artistic personalities, humanist bankers and well-educated entrepreneurs.

The message is clear – behind the skyscrapers’ thousand lights we can ultimately find a welcoming and inclusive, responsible and civil, metropolis. A metropolis we should get to know, understand and enrich, but also protect, to avoid it becoming too expensive, “a posh enclave”, a bubble of disproportionate wealth excluding young and creative people.

Reading about Milan only helps us understanding it better.

“I listen to your heart, city”, proclaimed with loving inquisitiveness Alberto Savinio during the first, thorny years of the 1940s, discovering a Milan that was “learned and meditative”, “romantic”, “all stone and hard on the outside” but also “softened by gardens on the inside”. Listening to this heart today, wondering like love-struck flâneurs amongst the streets and squares of some of the neighbourhoods that used to be suburban and working-class but are now under renovation, means trying to attune oneself to the variable voices, tensions and moods of those who live in a constant flow of social and cultural transformation. A colourful, working-class heart – a multicultural one, too, more recently – still vibrant with ancient memories, hurt by the harsh social differences yet nonetheless stirred by that special kind of hope that knows how to conceive and build positive changes. Then again, this is how Milan is – a kaleidoscope.

Let’s look at one of the many examples of this. NoLo (“North of Loreto”) is the ingenious new name given by a group of playful artists to a neighbourhood that, only a few years before, comprised the Gorla, Precotto and Turro areas, as well as the long straight streets heading north-east such as Via Padova and Viale Monza, and all the other roads running beyond Piazzale Loreto. A neighbourhood whose inhabitants, traditionally, were mainly factory workers, mechanicians and labourers, while now it features plenty of cafés and small eateries, cutting-edge cultural hubs, small squares saved from dilapidation, and gathering places where traditional residents mix with young artists and creative talents. It’s all very pop. So much so that it deserves its own “Guide”, part of a series published by newspaper la Repubblica and sold in bookshops and newsagents, listing the sites that are worth exploring.

NoLo shares its vibe with Milan. Because Milan always possessed a global vibe, as well as its own more intimate and discreet one. It’s an open, creative, strict yet welcoming city, as its own shape shows: round, with no corners, grown in concentric circles that, from the Navigli neighbourhood to its walls – the Mura Spagnole – and then to its ring roads, have absorbed hamlets and villages into itself, with the Duomo at the centre but looking outwards towards the world.

Milan on the go. After all, it never had barred gates meant to exclude, but toll houses to invite exchange and commerce, communication hubs, so that this city in the middle of a plain grew into a dynamic space through which people, ideas, goods, flowed, blending manufactures and cultures.

Its character has been unmistakable for a long time now, and it’s well summarised by the historic decree issued by the Archbishop of Milan Heribert of Ariberto, in 1018: “Those who know what work is come to Milan. And those who come to Milan are free people.” Work as an opportunity for personal and social growth, as a mark of citizenship, as an obvious token of freedom. A thousand years later, that decree is still echoing in conversations about Milan’s dynamic nature, in-between memories, the everyday and the future.

Work, indeed.

NoLo, before it acquired its new name, was a typical part of the industrial area of Milan, extending towards the manufacturing region of Brianza and bordering with the province of Bergamo – warehouse after warehouse, mainly developing northwards, interwoven with the Naviglio della Martesana canal, with its slow flow and bicycles on its bank. The Pirelli company in the Bicocca area, the Breda and Falck enterprises going towards Sesto San Giovanni. And, all around, a tangle of steelworks and chemical plants, workshops, warehouses, as well as factories and depots, smokestacks and railway tracks, a landscape featuring walls and machinery, beloved by painter Mario Sironi and engineer-cum-poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, born in Lucca yet Milan’s lovingly adopted son: “I enter a factory with my head uncovered, as if entering a cathedral, and I watch the movements of people and machinery as if they were part of a sacred rite… In these plants where people and machines bustle about works that always appear like a miracle: a metamorphosis.”

Metamorphosis. A word that accurately describes NoLo, too.

The huge factories are no longer there. The Bicocca area, following the projects accomplished by Vittorio Gregotti, now boasts a university with 35,000 students and a series of scientific research successes of international standing – a veritable “knowledge factory”. Nearby, office buildings, banks, publishing houses, the headquarters of multinational companies (Pirelli, Prysmian, Deutsche Bank, etc.) arise, as well as the HangarBicocca, one of the largest European centres for contemporary art, with “The seven heavenly palaces” by Anselm Kiefer and a schedule brimming with excellent exhibitions. The Sesto neighbourhood is no longer “Italy’s Stalingrad” but a residential and tertiary area. True, industry is still present, between the Monza and Brianza regions. In the city, however, is much less important than it used to be.

In NoLo, too, the metropolis is under transformation, it’s shedding its skin.

Refurbishing memories and building change.

Pensioners who still talk about the factory sirens that used to mark the time, about the fog, the taverns and eateries, are joined by new residents from all over the world, and, more recently, by a new wave of settlers – intellectuals, creative talents, young people who skilfully experiment with a different future.

Then again, this is what metropolises are: motion, transformation,

Milan was always driven by this, and it’s precisely these neighbourhoods that are able to renew themselves, that refuse to be just “suburbs” by choosing to breathe new life into their own squares, concocting new identities and getting renamed, which embody the city’s past while flying towards the future. Just as NoLo shows us, with a good dose of knowing irony. The human condition continues to be harsh, demanding, marked by hardship and hope, but it never gives up. Here, feelings retain a hopeful future.

A recent instance? BienNoLo, a contemporary art exhibition, a “neighbourhood Biennale” that brings avant-garde art to a wide, ordinary audience. An amusing, skilful interplay of installations, the images of colourful murals injecting new life into the time worn walls of old yards. Hybridisation. Regeneration. Imagination. Energy.

Another way to resume life, playfully yet earnestly. Then again, history teaches that even during the greatest crises, Milan’s recovery was always rekindled through culture.

The Pirelli Historical Archive holds four original drawings from 1964 by the painter Giuseppe Ajmone, who made them for Pirelli magazine. These four watercolours and gouaches on paper were commissioned from the artist, who was born in Carpignano Sesia on 17 February 1923, to illustrate Abruzzo senza pastori (“Abruzzo without Shepherds”) an article by the Romagna-born poet Raffaello Baldini.

The article is a tale in words and pictures of Ajmone and Baldini’s journey that year through the Gran Sasso and Maiella mountains. This was a suggested itinerary for tourists, and one of a series of articles published in Pirelli magazine in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. The company turned to the palettes of artists and to the inspiration of photographers to discover the lesser known areas of Italy and other countries. In the winter of 1959, for example, Renato Guttuso and Giovanni Pirelli went down the Nile from Aswan to the delta, while the writer Michele Prisco visited the Amalfi Coast together with his painter friend Gennaro Borrelli. And then Piero Chiara and Giovanni Cazzaniga went on a trip through the green and rocky Valsolda.

The nine watercolours that Ajmone made for this reportage were reproduced across a double page, becoming an important part of the article: an authentic story in pictures telling of the most beautiful lands in Abruzzo, where the landscape takes centre stage, amid natural elements and man-made constructions. The only human figure present in the painter’s works appears in an oil painting showing Signorina Gerarda Ciarletta, a telephone operator from Scanno, one of the few Abruzzo women – as the caption of the work informs us – who still wore the traditional costume. This work was presumably chosen by Arrigo Castellani, who was the editor-in-chief of the magazine at the time, for the cover of the issue in which the article was published.

Giuseppe Ajmone’s painting, with its misty but realistic rendering, effectively conveys the lights and charm of this “ancient land covered with trees, bushes or just moss, with sudden rolling plateaus, villages perched upon the coasts, beautiful little churches, a few sheep here and there, and many abandoned, ruined sheep pens”.

Pirelli’s earliest visual communication came in the form of illustrated product catalogues, which it published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They show how their decorative and illustrative functions were the focus of extreme care, alongside commercial considerations. The many rubber products made by Pirelli included consumer items that appeared in this type of communication, with clothing and haberdashery items, as well as tyres. These products targeted consumers and retailers, unlike the technical items and cables, which were capital goods mainly purchased by public administrations, or by industrial or transport companies.

The illustrations were entrusted to artists, some of whom were well-known, while others were less so: Giuseppe Barberis created lithographs for the 1886 list of elastic rubber carpets, Luca Fornari, a caricaturist and the founder of the weekly Il Mondo umoristico, created the clothing catalogues from 1896 to 1902; Giuseppe Galli and Osvaldo Ballerio created the illustrations for tyres, a product that requires immense advertising skills, for the market was already dominated by major competitors. In 1899 – the year that saw the first experimental production of “pneumatic garnitures for automobiles”, alongside those for bicycles and motorcycles – the painter Giuseppe Galli, a fairly successful watercolourist taken on by Pirelli in 1886 as a technical draughtsman and designer of ornamentation, illustrated the inside pages and the cover of the new price lists in a floral style with shades of gold.

In 1904 it was the turn of the painter Osvaldo Ballerio, who created the cover of the catalogue of “Tyres for Velocipedes, Motorcycles and Automobiles”. Born in Milan in 1870, and a graduate from the Accademia di Brera, he specialised in poster design and advertising graphics, with a particular focus on sports. In the 1910s he created several advertisements for Pirelli, which appeared on the covers of the Italian Touring Club magazine and in the magazines published by the Treves brothers (L’Illustrazione italiana, Il Secolo XX, and Lidel).

These were the years of the first real advertising campaigns in magazines and on posters, which were created by the great names in Italian and international poster design: Ballerio was soon joined by such artists as Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Alessandro Dudovich, and Plinio Codognato.

And this was the start of the long history of Pirelli advertising.